The Schwarzschild Radius (36 page)

U there?

Here. How are you?
typed Rachel.

Good.

Did you buy the ticket?

Yes, write this down. Flight 1343 Cathay Pacific Airways arrives at Kennedy Airport day after tomorrow at 2:30 a.m. your time. But don’t tell your parents until I arrive.

Don’t worry. U r welcomed here.

But keep it secret for now. If they stop me at JFK I can ask for political asylum. But before I arrive, it can be a problem. So don’t tell anyone―OK?

KK. Did you read the email I sent with questions and answers for Immigration here?

There was a pause.

Yes.

Let’s go over that so you know exactly how to answer
, typed Rachel.

No time now. Have to go.

You have everything you need? How will you get away to get to the airport?

I have a plan. But have to go now. I won’t be online again. Bye.

Rachel checked her Outlook. She had sent the email with high priority and with “Request a Read Receipt” checked off.

Achara hadn’t opened the email.

cKenna played the Belinda video over and over. It bugged him that the guy filming her was right there in the room with her and there was nothing he could do to see him. No cameraman shadows on the wall. When they erased the girl’s body from the video, could they have taken any other valuable evidence with it?

There was nothing to look at except the wall, the girl’s head, and the Christmas tree. When the tree came into view, he put it on pause and advanced as slowly as he could. That didn’t do much good since the pause feature froze the frame in a blur. Hanging off the tree were the usual lights and made-in-communist-China crap. Gingerbread cookies, nutcracker, globes, clip-on candles, snowflakes. Nothing unusual.

He burned the .avi file onto a DVD and put it in his full-size DVD player. The resolution was better than on his laptop. Now he could slow down the action and there was no blur when he froze it. The first appearance of the tree revealed nothing. The second time it appeared, a silver globe ornament caught his eye. Its spherical reflective surface acted like a wide-angle lens. The cameraman wasn’t reflected as there were branches obscuring that angle, but it did reflect something. He sat in his apartment replaying that over and over. The reflected image was of something rectangular on the floor. A vent? A fireplace? A low book case?

He focused on the image within the rectangle. There were figures in black and white. They were distinct, but distorted by the spherical surface, and McKenna couldn’t make out what they were. A store logo? McKenna reviewed the notes he had taken when he had questioned Massey both times in his office. There was no mention of a rectangular object on the floor. Also Massey’s office walls were off-white, not beige. Of course, that could have been painted over.

The object could have been something transient like a shopping bag with something printed on it. He went back to the start of the video, pausing every few moments. There seemed to be a lighter area on the wall like the outline made by a painting or a photo after it had hung there a long time before being removed.

There was a Picasso in his notes. He didn’t know the name of the painting, but it had a horse in it. He googled,
Picasso painting with a horse.

Guernica. That’s what the tree ornament reflected.

f traffic on the Belt Parkway held up, Rachel could make it to the terminal by two-thirty a.m. Achara would still have to go through Immigration, so figure two-forty, three a.m. She could probably park right across from the arrivals terminal at this hour.

She had left Joules’ house at 10:00 p.m. and gone back to her parents’ home. She decided to take a nap for an hour, but overslept. After washing her face and brushing her teeth, she crept out of the house, let the car roll down the driveway, and took off.

Over the last three days, they had downloaded thirty-six gigabytes of data from the computers belonging to Perlman, Sartorius, and Massey. They were never able to connect to Armand Greyson’s machine. So far, they had found child porn on Sartorius’ and Massey’s computers. The kids ranged from about eight to fourteen. Rachel had gone through hundreds of files, but there was nothing pointing to Olivia. No photos, no emails mentioning her, but there was still a lot to go through. At what point should she get Detective McKenna involved? How would she explain how she got access to the computers? Her parents would kill her if they found out. The men with child porn on their machines could be locked up, but what about the others? Unless Sonia testified against them, the law couldn’t convict them of statutory rape. Rachel hadn’t witnessed what went on in the bedrooms. But none of that would get Olivia back.

Rachel was counting on Joules to help her go through the rest of the files tomorrow. He said he would work on them while at school. What would she do without him? What did he think of her right now, after finding out she was in the homes of all these perverts? He was too discreet to press the matter. But was that out of politeness or indifference? If she had fallen in his estimation, what could she ever do to pick herself up again in his eyes? She hoped he understood that whatever she had done, it was to get her sister back. With Olivia absent, Rachel realized how important Joules was to her, even if he didn’t feel the same way.

She wished she had bought a present for Achara. All the niceties of life had dropped away since Olivia’s disappearance. What were her parents going to say when they saw this person who was the image of their own daughter, but wasn’t their daughter? Would that help or hurt?

They would have to accept her, like it or not. Olivia had, Rachel did, and so would they.

Then there was the matter of telling her that Olivia had vanished and that it was Rachel who had been talking with her these last few days. She would be greeted with one great joy and another terrible blow. She figured they’d stay at her dorm for the night and call the folks in the morning before coming by.

The Belt Parkway West was backed up seemingly for miles, as usual. Where were all these people going at this ungodly hour? After ten minutes of sitting in traffic, Rachel called the airline to confirm the arrival time, something she should have done before leaving. It was on time. That was a relief. Fifteen minutes later, she passed the bottleneck―a fender bender.

Rachel wished she could clone herself to do everything that needed to get done. She wanted to be a full-time student. When this was over and Olivia was back, she would sit and read Byron, Keats, and Shelly late into the night. She could minor in English Lit.

Cars speeded up. The overhead sign said,
TRAFFIC MOVING WELL
. Just twelve days ago it was flashing the Amber Alert for Olivia. Her disappearance had caused only a ripple in the scheme of things. Already she was fading away.

It all depended on the files she downloaded off those perverts’ computers. Every instinct told her that one of them knew where Olivia was. There had to be something on one of those PCs that pointed to her fate. She went over the faces of those men one by one. Could one of them have actually abducted Olivia? No doubt some of them had sex with her. But where could she be? Certainly not in any of the homes she had gone to. She had to be found at some point. Rachel didn’t want to go there, even in her thoughts, because thoughts were things and she wanted to deny the thought of her sister’s death any power.